View more from the

A company’s ability to function during a flu pandemic is only as good as the weakest link in its supply chain. Hoffman-La Roche, the maker of a frontline antiviral drug, works closely with its suppliers to ensure that their preparedness plans are as robust as its own.

The 2004–2005 flu vaccine shortage that followed British regulators’ shuttering of a Liverpool plant for manufacturing violations was a wake-up call for me. Pandemic preparedness is top of mind at Roche because we produce a frontline antiviral drug that the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree will be important in a flu pandemic. The sudden evaporation of nearly half of the expected U.S. flu vaccine supply that year brought home how vulnerable our complex supply chains really were and how serious a vaccine disruption could be during the annual flu season, let alone during a pandemic. It became crystal clear that while Roche had a comprehensive pandemic plan to maintain business continuity and to protect our 68,000 employees worldwide, our supply chain was only as strong as its weakest link. With this in mind, we set out to engage our suppliers, to ensure that their pandemic preparedness was as robust as ours, and to see what we could learn from them.

Here are the steps we took that every company should consider:

Play host to educate suppliers about pandemic planning.

Earlier this year, Roche gathered executives from more than 100 of our suppliers and business partners at our headquarters for a daylong discussion. The focus was on making supply chain central to business continuity management in general and to pandemic planning in particular. The meeting was designed to raise awareness about supply chain vulnerability as well as pandemic-related legal and medical issues companies may face. It also served as a forum for exchanging preparedness strategies with leading experts.

Determine which partners are critical to your operations.

To identify weaknesses in our supply chain, we rank each of our vendors on a three-point scale (high, medium, low) according to how critical they are to our ability to maintain operations in a pandemic. For example, we might rank the manufacturer of an essential pharmaceutical ingredient higher than a company that provides market data services. On the basis of this ranking, we prioritize our approach to suppliers and engage in one-on-one dialogues to ensure that each vendor has a thorough understanding of what we expect from them in a pandemic. During the conversations, we ask our suppliers about their ability to maintain operations and continue to meet our needs during a pandemic.

Such contracts could be especially important for companies that share vendors with several of their competitors. In a workshop Roche cosponsored for hospital leaders, much discussion focused on the importance of contractual agreements to ensure that, in the event of a pandemic, suppliers would not favor one customer over another. While this is a chief concern of hospitals that will care for massive numbers of patients in a pandemic, it also applies directly to other types of businesses.

Work with local government officials to gauge how their actions might affect your supply chain or the delivery of your product.

Roche maintains communication with local officials in areas where we do business to keep abreast of local governments’ anticipated actions during each stage of a pandemic, to share information, and to coordinate plans. For example, if we learn that a state might close certain roads during a pandemic, we will work with our transportation vendors to plan delivery alternatives for customers in the affected area. We encourage our suppliers to foster such relationships with their local governments.

Make pandemic planning a C-suite priority.

In addition to hosting company-to-company meetings with suppliers, we engage with them through peer-to-peer outreach. Members of our operating committee, myself included, reach out to our counterparts at partner companies on an ongoing basis to discuss the potential impact of a pandemic on their businesses. We are exploring what their information needs are, where potential vulnerabilities lie, and most important, how we can work together to address them. Besides helping to ensure business continuity in a pandemic or any disaster, we’ve found, engaging suppliers in this planning has improved supply chain efficiency and our ability to service customers in times of relative normalcy.

George Anders is the author of three books and the former West Coast bureau chief of Fast Company magazine; he is researching a new book on how we pick talent in America.

Partner Center

The email and password entered aren’t matching to our records. Please try again, or reset your password. If you have a username from our previous site, start by using that. Please See our FAQ for more.

If you are signing in for the first time on the new HBR.org but have an existing account, please enter your existing user name and password to migrate your account.Please see Frequently Asked Questions for more information.